The Fallen

“Everything Must Go” and “Thor.”

Rebecca Hall and Will Ferrell in a film based on a Raymond Carver story.Credit Illustration by ANDY FRIEDMAN

When a guy like Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) gets fired from his job and goes home to tell his wife, only to find that she has left him, what can you say? And when it transpires that, for good measure, she has locked him out of the house and frozen his access to their bank account, and that his employers, who had said that he could keep the company car till the end of the month, have decided to reclaim it after all, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was, perhaps, that vital indecision—our perennial seesaw between Schadenfreude and pity—that led Dan Rush, who wrote and directed “Everything Must Go,” to cast Ferrell as Nick. If the role had gone to William H. Macy, say, whose gaze is that of a spaniel that has been told it will never be taken for another walk, the hero’s epic ruefulness would have been readable at a glance. If the role had gone to Steve Carell, the shades of despair would have issued as a bravely smiling numbness. So what does Ferrell bring to the party—or, at any rate, to the movie’s lowering sense that the party is over?

Well, we get a dampened slapstick, as when Nick is woken by the spray of a garden sprinkler in the face, or tries to climb on plastic boxes to scale a wall. Then, there are Ferrell’s pale and piggy eyes, which can look mean when there are put-downs to be unleashed (I refer you to last year’s “The Other Guys”), but which, in this context, appear merely drained; any Ferrell fans hoping for rants and raves will be disappointed. As a rule, it is not until we see comedians on the defensive that we realize how much of their usual shtick, even of the amiable sort, has been grounded in offense. That was what Martin Scorsese identified in Jerry Lewis and used for “The King of Comedy,” in which Lewis seemed taut with discomfort even before he was physically trussed up. In Rush’s film, Ferrell’s bulk and height seem similarly stripped of threat. Nick spends much of his time stretched out in a reclining leather chair, on his front lawn, either drinking or drunk. Before his wife departed and changed the locks, she moved his stuff outside: a paddle, a rotisserie, a saxophone, a snow globe, and so on, plus a small stack of books, including “Good to Great” and “Speak Up! & Succeed.” At first he just sits there, like a piece of junk himself, but gradually the dumping ground becomes a yard sale. All this may look like defiance, but it’s really an act of surrender. Nick could write a book on it: “Shut Up! & Fail.”

“Everything Must Go” was inspired by Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance?,” the first story in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” In my edition, it takes up four and a half pages, and it tells of a guy sitting out on his lawn, with his belongings, and talking to a young couple who stop by. There are beautiful Carver parings, with words and even punctuation marks elided to leave mysterious gaps in which unspoken, or unspeakable, feelings may roam:

Lights came on in houses up and down the street.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if,” the girl said and grinned and didn’t finish.

We never learn the name of the guy, or why he is there, and this lands Dan Rush with a problem: How do you make a movie out of a snapshot? Or add to a concentrated narrative without dilution? When Robert Altman made “Short Cuts” (1993), he mixed together nine Carver tales, plus a Carver poem, to fill the bounds of the film; even so, he inserted further episodes of his own devising, and Rush, too, has trusted to invention. Thus, we begin in Nick’s workplace, with the glum rigmarole of his dismissal. We are present when Samantha (Rebecca Hall), pregnant and unaccompanied, moves into the house opposite Nick’s, and when, on a sentimental whim, Nick pays a visit to Delilah (Laura Dern), a friend from high school, purely on the strength of a remark that she scribbled in their yearbook, describing him as “a diamond in the rough.” Both Hall and Dern give expert portraits of benign wariness, instantly conscious that the roughness in Nick has scratched the gem beyond repair; look at Delilah’s face, over his shoulder, when, by way of farewell, he hugs her slightly too long.

His main discovery, in these alfresco days, is Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a smart black kid, on a bicycle, at a loose end. He helps Nick find buyers for his worldly goods. “Focus on the benefits,” Nick advises him. “Good sale. You’ve got the gift,” he adds, as Kenny clinches a deal. This is the most endearing, and convincing, aspect of “Everything Must Go”: the mild implication that not everything does go—that Nick retains a streak of his business acumen, and that the skills and the comforts of the bourgeoisie, however inadequate, are not to be peeled off, like bumper stickers, and tossed away. Some of Rush’s dialogue is clumsily geared toward the opposite, as when Nick tells Samantha to put up some curtains, “so you don’t have to look at your future,” or when Kenny asks what happened to him, and Nick replies, “Life happened, work happened, marriage happened.” But the sight of Nick arranging, not just strewing, his things around him, and the look of the film, photographed by Michael Barrett, tell a more delicate tale.

It was shot in Phoenix, not in that unforgiving lunchtime glare that Hitchcock used in the Phoenix scenes at the start of “Psycho” but in the more tolerant light of early morning and dusk, the hours of promise and regret. The result is a sad suburban pastoral, a strain of film you don’t see much of, or not enough; it may feel somewhat stretched, and Rush’s additions to Carver barely push it past ninety minutes, but anything hectic or hasty would have spoiled the mood. The follies of Nick need time and space in which to expand, as when he borrows Kenny’s bike and pedals off to buy beer at the Mini Mart, filmed in long shot, with high green hills behind him. Ferrell, looking as dumb as a clown on a circus bike, has found a new métier: to take the materials of minor tragedy and wheel them in the direction of farce.

Some gods have all the luck. When the hero of “Thor” plummets to Earth, from a far corner of the cosmos, in a storming thunderbolt, the first thing he sees upon waking is the face of Natalie Portman. Not a sheep, or a branch of Subway, or a rainy day in Pittsburgh but, I repeat, Natalie Portman. He must think that he has died and gone straight back to Heaven. What’s more, she plays a research scientist named Jane, and, in accordance with movie custom, is ripe for having her paltry scientific knowledge replaced with the wisdom of myth. “Do me a favor and don’t be dead,” she begs, as he lies there, and her prayer is answered. Not only is Thor (Chris Hemsworth) not dead; he’s really built. Him Thor, you Jane.

Once Thor stirs, the film itself comes belatedly to life. The first twenty minutes or so have been spent in other worlds, reachable only by intergalactic wormholes. One is Asgard, a haven of golden towers ruled by Thor’s father, the one-eyed Odin (Anthony Hopkins), and closely modelled on the cover of every mid-seventies concept album you wished you’d never bought. The other is the domain of red-eyed monsters with weapons of ice, who menace Asgard’s peace and are therefore treated to a violent visit from Thor, or, as they fearfully call him, Defrost. This mission, though bold, is deemed too reckless by Odin, who banishes Thor to Earth—New Mexico, to be precise. The countryside is filmed as gracefully as Arizona is, in “Everything Must Go,” and it comes as a genuine relief. “Thor,” in fact, is the year’s most divided movie to date; everything that happens in the higher realms, vaguely derived from Nordic legend, is posturing nonsense, whereas the scenes down here are managed, for the most part, with dexterity and wit.

“Thor” is based on a Marvel comic and directed by Kenneth Branagh. There are two facts you never expected to see in the same sentence. The sequence in which Thor, striving to retrieve his precious hammer, wrestles with a security guard in the mud has a slight, squelching connection with the climactic battle in Branagh’s “Henry V,” but, that aside, it’s hard to discern his touch. He seems most at ease with a brassy clash of cultures: Thor, in a diner, dashing his mug of coffee to the floor and crying, “Another!,” or striding into a pet store and declaring, “I need a horse.” Special effects seem to muffle rather than quicken Branagh’s interest, and, besides, there is no C.G.I. in existence that could cope with the difference between Portman, a practicing sylph, and Hemsworth, who looks to me like six and a half feet of corned beef. At one point, he takes his shirt off, and she stands beside him, a bit dazed, with the top of her head not quite parallel with his nipples. At the end—and I am giving away no secrets here—they kiss. But how? Is he holding her up, with her little toes kicking his kneecaps? Thor only knows. ♦

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